


by the wayside

by mortalitasi



Series: moonsbreath [1]
Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, First Meetings, Gen, Pre-Relationship, general neck-breaking and rescuing ahead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 15:48:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17348036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: Aloth and the Watcher meet in Gilded Vale.It's the first time she saves Aloth, but nowhere near the last.





	by the wayside

**Author's Note:**

> chopped off from a larger work bc it didn't fit the flow or timeline, but i still really like it so HERE U GO

The stranger is a cobalt shadow, moving like a blur of smoke.  
  
One minute, the red-faced townsman is raising his hatchet, intent on bringing it down on Aloth’s head, and the next everything is suspended. The stranger is standing with their back to him—he can see the strong line of their shoulders beneath their sleeveless wrapped vest, the quarterstaff of black wood slung on their back. The hand clamped around the townsman’s wrist is slender, but strong, unyielding, though the meaty arm it's holding is shaking with the effort of attempting to make contact.  
  
“Now, then,” the stranger says, and the voice sends a shock of surprise through him. It’s airy, friendly, and unerringly feminine, speaking in a light Aedyran accent. “This is all very unnecessary. Wouldn’t you rather be inside, drinking, than out here, arguing?”  
  
The elven woman standing to the left of the angry gathering spits at the ground, fury blazing in her green eyes. “Nobody asked you, _freak._ We don’t take no orders from foreigners. And we don’t take charity, neither.”  
  
“It sounds suspiciously like you’re defending him,” the drunkest man of all—not the one with the hatchet—sneers, looming closer.  
  
The stranger sighs, bogglingly enough, as if genuinely disappointed.  
  
Everything that happens in the next few moments is so fast Aloth hardly has time to process it. His mind, whirring ahead of his heart, lists the occurrences clinically, step-by-step, as though he’s studying methodology from a grimoire.  
  
Hatchet-man kicks out, trying to catch the stranger in the stomach, but she’s too fast for him. She breaks his arm in one clean movement (he howls in a register Aloth did not think anyone could reach), elbowing him in the face, snapping his neck with the momentum; next she's spinning effortlessly to avoid the lunging elven woman and the large dagger swinging her way. She knocks the dagger from the woman’s grip—then she strikes out, fists like vicious pistons, crushing a clavicle, a jaw, a rib, certainly; Aloth can hear the snapping of bones from where he’s standing, like dry branches breaking under the belly of a boulder. The elven woman drops, as would a stone, blood bubbling from between her lips.  
  
The last man charges at her with his club held high—a stupendously foolish move, to say the least—and gets a collapsed windpipe as a reward. He dies in the mud, gasping and choking for breath, while Aloth’s savior looks down on him.  
  
He doesn’t know how he didn’t notice that the stranger had _blue skin_ before, but he does now, when she turns to face him, the full peculiarity of her countenance coming into view. She has a delicate face, framed by fine hair and two curves of iridescent turquoise horn. Her ears are pointed—he would have mistaken her for an ordinary elf if not for the color of her skin, for her stature and height betrays her origin. He has never been so close to a godlike before—the hum of magic she emits is something he can feel on his skin.  
  
She looks at him with eyes like pearls, featureless, but arresting in their simplicity, and he realizes he should probably say something. Anything.  
  
“ _Tell ‘er she’s a right sight in this bloody dump. Look at the lass!”_ crows Iselmyr, most helpfully, from some unmentionable corner of his soul. He ignores her—as usual.  
  
“Not quite how I hoped to get to know the neighbors,” he begins. “Thank you for your timely assistance with that… awkward situation.”  
  
Sarcasm. Sarcasm is safe.  
  
She gives him a bright smile, like she didn’t just kill three people in the space of ten heartbeats. “I’m glad I could help,” she says. He can detect no falsehood.  
  
“Courtesy is a rare pleasure in these parts,” he replies. “As is the company of a fellow countrywoman.”  
  
She chuckles, scratching at a cheek. “Ah—well. It’s not all bad. The Eastern Reach has some beautiful places.”  
  
He wrinkles his nose. “This is not one of them.”  
  
“Perhaps not.”  
  
“I suppose introductions are in order after that little fiasco,” he goes on, clasping his hands together. “Aloth Corfiser, at your service.”  
  
“Aloth,” she says, testing out the name. She blinks at him, periwinkle lashes and thoughtful expression, and smiles again. “I am Ileána.”  
  
It fits her.  
  
She is shorter than him, by a good couple of inches—but even so, he feels small standing opposite her. Her build is wiry and lithe, tempered by what must be years of dedicated training; she is wearing simple clothing, form-fitting, easy to move in, all in dark colors. She does not _seem_ dangerous. But he remembers what she did, without even reaching for the quarterstaff at her back. This is an opportunity. Perhaps he can find his way across this backwater and minimize his chances of dying horribly in the process, if he stays near to her.  
  
He can see no other weapons at her disposal, at least not from a cursory glance.  
  
“Are you alright?” she asks in a soft voice, and he jolts like he's been shocked. He'd been _staring._  
  
“Fine!” he all but yelps. “I—ahem. I am well. I wasn't hurt.”  
  
“That's good,” she says. Her eyes are watching him intently, with unsettling insight. “You would probably be best off no longer provoking farmers of any sort. Mobs form quickly out here.”  
  
He coughs into one hand while Iselmyr’s laughter echoes in his head. “I'm afraid that was a matter of misunderstandings and mistranslations,” he begins, none too cautiously. “It doesn't help that people in these parts remember their war with Aedyr like it was yesterday.”  
  
Now her attention is curious, though her expression is still politely neutral. He wishes his hood were bigger. Or that there were a hole somewhere near, large enough to hide in.  
  
“Well,” she says, “you _did_ make a rather lewd suggestion regarding one of the aggressors and his own sister.”  
  
That must be the most tactful summary of an Iselmyr misdemeanor he's ever heard. “Ah,” he stutters. “That. As I tried to tell them, they misheard me. Happens too easily after a few pints, and the accent doesn't help.”  
  
She does not look convinced, her eyebrows rising above her almond-shaped eyes. “I heard the same thing.”  
  
He feels Iselmyr’s will well up against the confines of his mind, straining at his defenses, more than ready to cleverly reply. He will never be able to become accustomed to the sensation of losing control, knowing his own face and body are responding to the call of someone else. Not even in what most consider the private sanctum of any kith is he alone—there are always others cramming into his space, demanding time or obedience or silence. He will not let her wreck this chance he might have at finding his way, finding answers. She has taken enough.  
  
“I should speak more clearly next time,” he manages, when at last he deems it secure to open his mouth. “My apologies.”  
  
She seems to understand that's as much as she'll get from him. “How did you find yourself in Gilded Vale? You're a long way from home.”  
  
He laughs nervously. “I could say the same of you,” he returns, and then launches into his prepared story. He tells her the truth—mostly, anyhow—of his origins, where he is from, though he leaves the part about being effectively stranded by his supervisor out, glossing over the reasons for why he had been bound to travel to the Dyrwood. He hopes it is more compelling than the stumbling excuse he made for Iselmyr’s vulgarity.  
  
“Strange,” she murmurs when he's done, her gaze sliding over him once again, lingering on the fine embroidery of his gloves, the good leatherwork of his boots. It's like having ice pressed to his spine. “You don't look like a settler.”  
  
He has to turn this around on her somehow, and swiftly. “Neither do you,” he remarks.  
  
Her lips quirk into a grin. “That's because I'm not.”  
  
“What brings you to Gilded Vale, then?” he asks, glancing down at the corpses around them. “It can't be the sights.”  
  
She chuckles, but it's a sad sound. “I was travelling with a caravan bound for this town. But we got… separated. Had to take shelter in some ruins. I found my way out.”  
  
Interest lances through him, keen and familiar. ‘I.’ Singular. The only survivor? He must find out. “ _Engwithan_ ruins? Those can be dangerous places at the best of times… which these are not. Half the locals would arrest you for trespassing and the rest would kill you outright.”  
  
“ _Dinnae talk her ear off, you daft gabber. Whit should she care?”_ Iselmyr grouses, her voice keen as a bugle-call amidst his thoughts. “ _Wid much rather give those horns a good_ —”  
  
“I'm curious,” he says, drowning out the rest of that alien and _completely inappropriate_ idea. “What exactly did you find there?”  
  
Ileána regards him carefully before responding, two short words that make every hair on his arms stand on end. “A bîaŵac.”  
  
“And you _survived_?” Aloth marvels, looking at her like he's seeing her for the first time all over again. “I've heard such a thing was impossible.”  
  
She shrugs, slim shoulders rolling up. “I'm as confused about it as you are,” she admits. Her mouth presses into a grim line. “I don't know why it was—me.”  
  
He shakes his head at her. “It seems you either have a knack for timing, or the favor of the gods,” he says. “Perhaps both.”  
  
“I'll concede to the first,” she says, digging her heels into the ground and sighing. “But it certainly doesn't feel like the second.”  
  
He tries to imagine what it would be like to endure a soul-shearing storm, and finds he doesn't want to think about it much. There's a reason the Empire abandoned Eir Glanfath to its own devices. “I can see how it wouldn't,” Aloth mutters, worrying at the pommel of his scepter in anxious habit.  
  
She stretches, languid, much like a cat. “I should get going,” she remarks, and his stomach takes a swooping dive toward his toes.  
  
“As should I, given recent events,” he replies, very proud of how steady that comes out. “It's just as well. I've had enough of the watered wine and the lumpy beds at the inn.” The distaste in his voice for that bit is genuine and undiluted, which is not something that can also be said for the awful, aforementioned swill they try to pass off as wine in there. “They say even the owner tired of the place. Just up and left one day. Certainly explains a lot about the upkeep.”  
  
“ _You're rambling again,_ ” Iselmyr interjects. She is, shockingly, not entirely wrong.  
  
And now for the hook. He looks at the godlike woman, hating the sudden dryness of his mouth. “Perhaps… I could join you. I could use a change of scenery—and I find it's better to travel in numbers.”  
  
She huffs what could have been a laugh as she appraises him. “You have the right of it,” she says. “Company wouldn't hurt.”  
  
Part of the weight that had been pressing down so resolutely on his shoulders evaporates at her words. He smiles, saying, “Oh, excellent. I shall follow you.”  
  
That's one thing he is good at, he knows. Following.


End file.
